Video transcript

(piano music playing) Steven: She stands against the window, looking out, but really looking in In a terribly gaudy purple nightgown. Out the window, we can
see the city of London. We can see the Thames River. Beth: We're looking at John Roddam Spencer Stanhope's Thoughts of the Past. Steven: If we were Victorian
looking at this painting, we would immediately recognize
that she was a prostitute. Beth: And that she's
thinking about her past life as a virtuous woman, likely
from the countryside, who had come to the
city and who had fallen, in Victorian terms, a
fallen woman, a prostitute. Fallen women were the subject of paintings and literature during
this period, a kind of social problem for artists
and writers to deal with. Steven: So she's a
sympathetic figure to a large extent and we, as a middle-class public, were expected to grapple
with her predicament. Beth: Exactly and who was at fault and what could be done about it? You can see how closely
the artist ties her problem to the problem of the city
and the growth of the city. Steven: Well, let's look out that window. It's this bustling port on
the Thames, on the river that bisects London. I can almost hear men
yelling to each other across those boats and in the foreground, we see what looks like hay on a barge and that hay, of course,
would have been brought to the city from the
country in order to feed the horses and it does make
it kind of analogy to this woman who has become a kind of commodity, something that is bought and sold. Beth: Apparently, this part of the Thames was an area that was
well-known for prostitution. So all of this would
have been recognizable to a Victorian viewer. Another thing we can immediately notice, just the fact that this
is painted very much in a Pre-Raphaelite style. We
have those intense colors that are really saturated,
like this purple and the greens and the reds and
showing a female figure with long, red hair is
also very Pre-Raphaelite. Steven: One of the things
Pre-Raphaelites are so known for, is to imbue
almost everything with a kind of secondary meaning
with a kind of symbolism. They were looking back
at the great paintings at the very beginning of the Renaissance, perhaps, for instance The
Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, which is in the national gallery now. So when you look at that red hair, does that secondary
reference to the Renaissance tradition of representing Mary Magdalene with long, red hair and of
course the tradition of her being a prostitute, but
there there's a sense of redemption and here, I think,
that's an open question. Beth: We're not sure
what her future holds. She's thinking about her past. She's thinking about
what's happened to her and perhaps her family in the countryside, her lost childhood, her lost innocence. As you said, all of that
is also indicated by the accessories in this room. Steven: In the lower left
corner of the painting, I see a potted plant, maybe
two, and they're little bit too low, so the plants have
been stretching up to get back to the sun. They're dry. They're not
tended. They may die. Beth: And their leaves are turning yellow. Steven: Perhaps worse,
up in the lower right corner of the painting,
you can see those ... those violets, there's purple
and white, which are linked directly to the
colors that the woman wears and they've been discarded
and they will now wilt and die. Beth: And if you look at
the Arnolfini Wedding, everything in that painting
speaks about the wealth of the couple that's represented, but here we have furniture
that's chipped and worn. Even her jewelry on the
table looks cheap and tawdry. Other details in the room
that tell us about her life are a little bit hard to see,
perhaps, in the foreground on the left, we see a man's
walking stick and glove. Steven: So this painting in many ways, is a wonderful window into
the moral preoccupations of Victorian life in
the city at this time. (piano music playing)